The Amiga 1000 computer had a little red light, right next to the power switch, but it wasn't just a power indicator. Whenever I – back then, a clueless 12-year-old – tried to run a pirated, cracked game from a worn-out 3.5" floppy, I kept a nervous eye on that light. If it started blinking, it meant that something's gone terribly wrong, the computer is restarting, and I won't be playing ..read more

At least, probably not as often as you think you do. Using a preemptive RTOS ("real-time operating system") can help make a system schedulable (i.e. help all of its tasks meet their deadlines) but it comes at a cost: "concurrently" running tasks can interact in unforeseen ways that cause system failures, that dreaded class of errors known as "race conditions". In part, this is because ..read more

I have often talked and written about my thoughts on programming languages. In particular, the fact that there really is no language that was designed with embedded programming specifically in mind. Historically, there was assembly language, but that is rarely used for large scale coding nowadays. Intel promoted PL/M many years ago, but that has long since fallen by the wayside. C and C++ are ..read more

Mongooses and very small pythons can coexist, and even be friends. This is more a framework than an actual application, with it you can integrate MicroPython and Cesanta's Mongoose. Mongoose runs when called by MicroPython and is able to run Python functions as callbacks for the events you decide in your event handler. The code is completely written in C, except for the example Python ..read more

Overview In the previous blog post (Getting Started With CUDA C on Jetson Nvidia: Hello CUDA World!) I showed how to develop applications targeted at a GPU on a Nvidia Jetson Nano. As we observed in that blog post, performing a calculation on a 1-D array on a GPU had no performance benefit compared to a traditional CPU implementation, even on an array with many elements. In this blog post ..read more

Understaning PIC Configuration This second in a series of five blog posts continues exploring getting started with Microchip’s 8-bit PIC family of microcontrollers by delving into basic processor memory organization and how this family of microcontrollers initialize, specifically: PIC Memory & Registers PIC Configuration Sources Revisiting MPLAB X Project ..read more

While beneficial to embedded developers, the C programming language can be inflexible. For example, have you ever had a function that had to manage multiple types? How did you solve that problem? I bet you either duplicated that function, which led to confusing code or used a complex series of macros. Neither of those is terribly helpful because it creates code that is difficult to maintain ..read more

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. So, if you are going to deal with a problem slightly harder than switching a lightbulb on and off, you may want something better in your toolbox than what I described in my previous post on State Machines. In this post, I'll start from the basic ad-hoc implementation presented in my last post and will decouple the state handling (the state ..read more

Introduction Sales of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) have exploded over the past few years due to the rising popularity of machine learning applications. However, GPUs were originally architected and designed for gaming applications. Their native architecture naturally translated into use in machine learning due to the similar operations performed. Nvidia is one of the most ..read more

This is a short article about how to analyze the diode in some gate drive circuits when figuring out turn-off characteristics — specifically, determining the relationship between gate drive current and gate voltage during turn-off of a power transistor. Here’s the diode I’m talking about; it’s the one labeled D1: Just as an example, I’m going to use the ..read more